When Was the "Palestinian People" Created? Google Has the Answer.

All people born in British Mandatory Palestine between 1923-1948 (today's Israel) had "Palestine" stamped on their passports at the time. But when they were called Palestinians, the Arabs were offended. They complained: "We are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The Palestinians are the Jews".

After invading Arab armies were routed and the Arabs who had fled the war wanted to return, they were considered a fifth column and not invited back. The Arabs who had loyally remained in Israel during the war, however, and their descendants, are still there and make up one fifth of the population. They are known as Israeli Arabs; they have the same rights as Christians and Jews, except they are not required to serve in the army unless they wish to.

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese." – PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, interview in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 1977.

In an op-ed in the Guardian on November 1, 2017, ahead of the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas called on the UK to "atone" for the century of "suffering" that the document allegedly wrought on the "Palestinian people." Abbas reiterated the claims he has been making since 2016, to justify a surreal lawsuit he has threatened to bring against Britain for supporting the "creation of a homeland for one people [Jews], which, he asserted, "resulted in the dispossession and continuing persecution of another."

"Palestinians" were the Jews who lived, along with Muslims and Christians on land called Palestine, which was under British administration from 1917 to 1948.

All people born there during the time of the British Mandate had "Palestine" stamped on their passports. But the Arabs were offended when they were called Palestinians. They complained: "We are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The Palestinians are the Jews".

"With the rise and spread of pan-Arab ideologies it was as Arabs, not as south Syrians, that the Palestinians began to assert themselves. For the rest of the period of the British Mandate, and for many years after that, their organizations described themselves as Arab and expressed their national identity in Arab rather than in Palestinian or even in Syrian terms."

When Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, five Arab armies joined up to try to kill the infant nation in its crib. After they were routed, some of the local Arabs who had fled the war wanted to return, but they were considered a fifth column and most were not allowed back. The Arabs who had loyally remained in Israel during the war, however, and their descendants, are still there and make up one-fifth of Israel's population today. They are known as Israeli Arabs; they have the same rights as Jews, except they are not legally required to serve in the army. They may volunteer if they wish to.

Israeli Arabs have their own political parties. They serve as members of Knesset and are employed in all professions. The moral is, or should be: Do not start a war unless you are prepared to lose it -- as the Arabs in and around Israel have done repeatedly, in 1947-48, 1967 and 1973.

Incidentally, the land that was being held in trust for the Jews in the British Mandate for Palestine initially included all of what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, which was granted its independence in 1946 as the Kingdom of Transjordan.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Less than a week after the article in the Guardian, Omar Barghouti, the instigator of today's attempts to destroy Israel by suffocating it economically, echoed Abbas in a Newsweekpiece, calling the Balfour Declaration "a tragedy for the Palestinian people."

The same sentiment was expressed at the end of September in a lecture delivered by Rashid Khalidi -- the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University -- at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies in New York City: that the Balfour Declaration "launched a century-long assault on the Palestinians aimed at implanting and fostering this national homeland, later the state of Israel, at their expense..."

Khalidi's claims, like those of Abbas and Barghouti, are false. Prior to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, there were no "Palestinians." As the prominent Lebanese-American historian and Mideast expert Philip Hitti stated in his testimony before the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry: "There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not."

Authors Guy Millière and David Horowitz elaborate on this in their 2015 book, Comment le peuple palestinien fut inventé ("How the Palestinian People Were Invented"), illustrating that the purpose of the fabrication was "to transform a population into a weapon of mass destruction against Israel and the Jewish people, to demonize Israel, and to give totalitarianism and anti-Semitism renewed means of action."

The ploy for a while worked beyond expectations. The term "Palestinians" was used across the world -- including in Israel -- to define the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza; it is often employed also to describe Arabs with Israeli citizenship. The narrative that the Jews displaced them by establishing a state completely contradicts the facts.

What are these facts? When was the "Palestinian people" actually created? Simply using the Google Ngram Viewer provides the answer.

Ngram is a database that charts the frequency that a given phrase appears in books published between the years 1500 to 2008. When a user enters the word phrases "Palestinian people" and "Palestinian state" into the Ngram search bar, he discovers that they began appearing only in 1960.

In his November 2, 1917 letter to Walter Rothschild, the leader of Britain's Jewish community, Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour wrote:

"His Majesty's government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine [emphasis added], or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Finally, apart from Ngram, there are the words of the PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, who, in a March 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, stated:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct Palestinian people to oppose Zionism.

"For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."

Jean Patrick Grumberg is a journalist for the French-language news site Dreuz.

Comment on this item

29 Reader Comments

dkjack • Feb 26, 2018 at 16:29

This has been the most useful precis of the fraud on which the Arabs base their campaign of annihilation against Israel and the Jews. I send links of this page to friends whenever the subject comes up, usually after another terrorist attack or media edition of Palestinian victimology.

Reply->

Andy • Nov 25, 2017 at 14:51

Palestinians are Edomities, the children of Esau, brothers to Jacob. Now, you understand the rest of the story!

Reply->

ABDELKADER HAMDAOUI • Nov 23, 2017 at 05:17

There are no such people as the so-called Palestinians. They are Arabs dislodged from Egypt, Jordan and Syria given sanctuary in the land of Judea by the people of Israel.

Reply->

arthur • Nov 22, 2017 at 11:44

First there has been a virtually continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel since Biblical times, although often a scattered remnant as a result of invasion and war, Babylonia, Persian, Assyrian, Roman, Mameluk, Crusader, Arab, Muslim etc. In his travels to the Holy Land, Mark Twain talks about the Jews, the Brits did a census in the 1920s and showed a large Jewish population. A large proportion of the Arabs moved to the area in response to the first and second Aliyah. The Brits reneged on the Balfour declaration out of fear of the Arabs revolting and to safe guard its oil interests and dependency.

Reply->

Clive Stephen Delmonte • Nov 22, 2017 at 02:01

This is the clearest, most cogent and accurate summary of post World War I "Palestinian" history I have ever read. Well done Mr Grumberg !

Reply->

Linda • Nov 21, 2017 at 12:32

This is a great article with some really needed facts. This should be reprinted in every media type possible. It is so disheartening that most of the world is so ignorant of the facts surrounding this conflict and have no will to find out the truth. They just believe the lies the current popular media puts out. I hardly believe anything that is publicized in popular media anymore.

Joy, the left, like islam, wishes to conquer all of humanity, and it helps if published material agrees with their arguments so that they get less trouble from those whose lives they would be upending by seizure. the UN has been run by kleptocrats and leftists virtually from the beginning; there have been few rational statements made within its halls since the very start, but it does by appearances do some good (the UH High Commission on Refugees likes to appear that way, but is a hard-left group of liars and propagandists), so its word carries some weight (far more than deserved). in other words, the UN is a hard-left and criminal organization that can fool a lot of people, so its leftist controllers are using it to full advantage by rewriting history to make future victims feel safe so they don't try to protect themselves until too late.

Reply->

Joy Holbrook b.a. freeman • Nov 26, 2017 at 17:13

Thank you. There's an awakening in Australia to the corruption and sheer rottenness that is the UN. Our deputy prime minister is a devoted fan however. There are growing calls for Australia to leave the UN. We pay them money we can't afford for the privilege of being harangued because, according to the UNHCR, we're not taking in enough refugees.

Reply->

Ofra Ben David • Nov 20, 2017 at 13:10

Your articles are honestly written and can educate most people who lack history knowledge of the ME, and specially the so called journalists of the MSM who are clueless about that part of the world.

Reply->

David Guy • Nov 20, 2017 at 12:45

On September 9, 1993 Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin wrote a letter to Yasser Arafat as Chairman of the PALESTINIAN Liberation Organization in which the Government of Israel specifically "decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the PALESTINIAN people". However artificial that the Palestinian label might be the 'Palestinians don't exist' horse has long bolted. At the risk of stretching the metaphor to breaking point denying the existence of the Palestinians in 2017 is flogging a dead horse.

It is a fascinating comment on self identification that whatever they may have thought of themselves in 1917 or 1948 for decades now the residents of the lands ruled from 1948 to 1967, many Arab citizens of Israel and not a few descendants of those who left long before 1948 and are now living in places as diverse as Chile and Honduras consider themselves as Palestinians. This includes those who left as a response to the oppression of Christians in Ottoman Palestine even before Balfour.

What do we expect to gain by denying Palestinian identity in 2017? That they will suddenly wake up, admit they haven't a case and leave?

Attacking Palestinian identity has its mirror in the belief of many Muslims and fellow-travellers of the Palestinian agenda (judging by comments in social media) that the Jews never were in Israel; that the Jews today are not descendants of the biblical Hebrews or that Ashkenazi Jews are really some sort of Turkic-Mongol immigrant with no connection to the land and therefore no claim to it. Of course these claims are false but it would be irrelevant if true. Israeli Jews are no more likely to accept the Palestinian narrative (and leave) than are the Palestinians to accept the relatively recently created origin of their national identity.

We should be concentrating on more practical discussions.

Reply->

Barry Rab David Guy • Nov 21, 2017 at 10:32

Here is an interesting article about claims to "Palestine".

http://www.meforum.org/2462/the-quran-israel-not-for-jews

" Among these scholars is British-based imam Sheikh Muhammad Al-Hussaini, who asserts that early Muslim intellectuals recognized that Israel belonged to the Jews. "You will find very clearly that the traditional commentators from the eighth and ninth century onwards have uniformly interpreted the Koran to say explicitly that Eretz Yisrael [Heb. The Land of Israel] has been given by God to the Jewish people as a perpetual convenant [sic]. There is no Islamic counterclaim to the Land anywhere in the traditional corpus of commentary."[3] "

Reply->

Michael Davison David Guy • Nov 21, 2017 at 11:20

The fact is that those calling themselves a "Palestinian people" don't meet the anthropological definition for a "nation of people". There's no unique language, history, religion or customs not shared with the general "Arab world".

These same people who left in 1948 were, in large part, economic migrants from neighboring Arab countries whose residence in the Palestine Mandate was either illegal ("non-documented" to be PC) and/or rather short. That's one of the reasons that the UNRWA criterion for refugee status (two years) differs from that of the UN High Commission for Refugees (a minimum of five years).

Even UNRWA has admitted multiple times over the years that the initial number of "Palestinian refugees" (approximately 700,000) was highly inflated, partly because most of the residents of the West Bank, Eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip prior to 1948 were also classified as "refugees", as were the economic migrants who held citizenship in Arab states.

As it stands, Israelis have proven willing to share the land, only to be met with the Palestinian "all or nothing" policy demanding, according to their own slogans, "Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea".

For some reason, the Palestinian demand for ethnic cleansing of all of "historic Palestine" goes unchallenged, despite it being a direct contradiction of the UN Charter.

The prime topic for discussion must be to show the Palestinians that they cannot have all they want and that they have a choice: they can either agree to share the land or remain in perpetual conflict with Israel, which is not going to go away to suit their demands.

Reply->

Steve Hooper David Guy • Nov 22, 2017 at 23:30

Mr Guy, you raise an interesting point about the legitimacy of this discussion. However, it seems clear to me that the so-called Palestinians have long been more than a little disingenuous in the way they have consistently shifted and turned in order to manipulate world opinion in their favour. With Israel's very right to exist now in doubt, at least in the minds of many in the West, this insistence, propagated for so long, on the Arab people's rights to the whole region, really needs to be challenged in the mainstream media. Only then, when the West stops supporting Arab aggression, will these people agree to settle and live side-by-side with their neighbours.

Reply->

Vijayakumar Samuel • Nov 20, 2017 at 12:19

Instead of Oslo (Norwegians), the Brits should have been involved in negotiation with the Balfour declaration and formation of TransJordan as the base. The British cleverly tried to please both the different ethnic groups -- Arabs and Jews -- but ended backstabbing the Jews. Zuheir Mohsen wouldn't want the Palestine of 1800s -- a desolate piece of wasteland. Today all these people want to keep the Palestine problem alive because of the Dollars and Euros being poured in. If only the Europeans and the UN which pours out millions stop their funding and start asking questions for the usage of money all these voices will shut their mouths, they should announce that all the funding will be done through Jordan and for settlement inside Jordan. So if the US under Trump is serious about peace in the Middle East (which is an utopia as per the Bible) then Jordan, PA, Britain must be involved otherwise it will be futile as US is an outsider and so acts only as a facilitator.

Reply->

Ron Wasserman • Nov 20, 2017 at 12:15

Growing up in New York City in the 1950's, I recall many institutions, not to mention a Brooklyn barber shop, with the appellation "Palestinian". Not a one of them had any connection with Arabs. As late as the 1970's, even Jews, when referring to Israel, would sometimes call it Palestine. This ingenious propaganda coup by "Palestinians" was the brainchild of Moscow Central during the Soviet era.

" Contradicting Abbas' historical revision, just a day before, PA official TV broadcast an interview with the historian Abd Al-Ghani Salameh, who explained that in 1917, the time of the Balfour Declaration, there was no Palestinian people. "

Reply->

Owen Morgan • Nov 20, 2017 at 10:26

"Rashid Khalidi -- the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University"

Two charlatans for the price of one and, if you throw in Khalidi's chum, Barack Obama, that makes three.

Reply->

sabasarge • Nov 20, 2017 at 10:21

While it is good and also important to keep repeating the facts, the truth is that with the level of Jew-hatred (let's call anti-Semitism by its' true name) found acceptable in today's world, I get the feeling that facts simply do not matter. Lenin (or was it Goebbels?) had it right when he, to paraphrase, said that if one repeats a big enough lie enough times.....presto, it becomes the truth. The "Palestinian narrative" is the perfect example of this truism.

Reply->

jeb • Nov 20, 2017 at 08:31

Being Palestinian is more akin today to belonging to cult that does not require proof because it is a "religious" idea. Except their identity is not religious and can not be given the same latitude for faith. That is the point of keeping church and state separate in the west. What one believes or has faith in should be a religious distinction, but much of that has been compromised by the ideology of the left, socialists, and Islamists or Jihadis who aren't Jihadis.
Today when I read a "Palestinian's" claim of identity I am with increasing frequency assuming they are Muslims and that is why they reject history and dictate that we should do the same as if not to do so is Islamophobic or anti-"Palestinian". If I can't make the distinction its because they don't. They give their political acts religious significance and now it is nearly impossible to separate the two because Islam in 21st Century has ceased to be a religion it is a theocratic ideology with hostile intent toward anyone believing believing differently.

Reply->

b.a. freeman jeb • Nov 23, 2017 at 18:36

jeb, i would say that it *is* a religion and has been for over 1000 years. in the beginning, if one reads the islamic scriptures (such as the extant parts of ibn ishaq's "sirat rasul allah"), it was obviously a ploy by the psychopath muhammed to draw criminals to his cause to keep the loot coming, but after a century or two, it became religious for real. the religion is poisonous and hideous, i will grant U, but many of the worst pious muslims are those who are the most religious.

Reply->

Gabriel Louis • Nov 20, 2017 at 06:18

Mr. Grumberg, that was a very powerful and informative article. The truth of things has a profound way of captivating not only me but justice seekers everywhere. It is my hope and prayer that people will educate themselves with the actual course of things so that we may avoid further conflict. Not only in the Near East, but in all countries. Thank you for exceptional report.

Reply->

SNG • Nov 20, 2017 at 05:45

While sympathetic to much of what I read here I am also sympathetic to having a true picture.

Conceding the position that there was no Palestinian state or identity, that the area was the long-term plaything of greater external powers, that their identity was more based on an overarching Arab one, but locally based around clans tribes, the key issue as I understand it hinges on the answer to this question:

How long were those who existed there before 1948 in residence in the immediate area? i.e. how deep were their roots in the area?

If the answer is *deep* (as appears to be the case) then arguments regarding previous statehood are irrelevant.

The requirement for previous statehood of course is not in modern Jews favour either (Israel/Judah millennia before).

And what's the alternative, mass deportation to Jordan or just retaining this shaky status quo into the future?

Reply->

Jasper Farnsworthy SNG • Nov 23, 2017 at 04:56

The only thing preventing the so-called "Palestinians" from enjoying their lives in Judea and Samaria is their own intransigence. The Arabs who elected to stay during the 1948 war and tie their future to the Jewish state have prospered. Consider Abu Ghosh as a prime example. Moreover, Arabs who have accepted Israeli citizenship have all the rights and privileges of the Jews, including seats in the Knesset -- more freedoms then they'll ever hope to see in any additional "Palestinian" state...which, as a reminder, such a state already exists [see comment below].

Reply->

b.a. freeman SNG • Nov 23, 2017 at 19:04

SNG, most records i have seen indicate that the population of "palestine" outside the cities (which weren't very large) was very low until the zionists arrived and began to dig out old wells (which had been poisoned and filled with rocks by invading muslims) and replant fields that had been dormant and desertified for many centuries. in the first centuries of islam, the muslims were generally very good at extortion (collecting "jizyah," which is protection money), rape, and murder, but not much else; they parasitized society, killing indiscriminately, because most of the conquered people did not wish to convert. the "dhimmi contract" (paying protection money) was a great way to torment and terrify the populace while squeezing them for as much money as possible. if a farmer had a bad year and couldn't fork over enough to please his muslim betters, they killed the farmer, raped his wife and daughters, and burned everything; this was bad for agriculture, and the muslims weren't farmers, so they saw no problem with it. eventually, the descendants of the conquered people gave up and converted, because it made life much easier, especially since islam's demon god doesn't give a rat's a** about what a person really believes, caring only for obedience. that didn't happen until subsequent generations, though, and in the meantime, rural population (and the urban population supported by them) declined.

at the time of conquest, the middle east was the most advanced part of the mediterranean world, where the best of everything was found. the ulema decided that what happened in one second was unconnected with what happened in the following second (because allah is all-powerful), so the idea that reality can be tested to find out how things work (the idea and practice of scientific inquiry) was thus questioning the authority of allah. questioning allah is blasphemy, so science is not allowed. the left and muslim apologists go on and on about how islam preserved the documents of the ancient world, but the destruction of the other 90% of the books are due to pious muslims, who decided that if books were not about allah and islam, they should be burned; if they were about them, the muslims already had all the relevant material, so the new books didn't matter, and should be burned. the only books that survived did so only because they were hidden from muslim conquerors.

thus, the original muslims were about as useful to society as the ms-13 gang is today. when the zionists arrived, the land was virtually empty. the ancestors of today's palestinians were brought in by the original zionists to work for them. it was the zionists who made the desert bloom, with the help of the people from the surrounding territories whom they hired as employees. as in the past, muslims are far better at destroying things than building things. islam is a gangsta cult which parasitizes civilization; there is no such thing as "islamic civilization."

so make of the name what U will. there are those who are civilized (israel), and there are those who have a brain/thought disease (islam), who wish to kill all the males of israel and rape all the females. this thug cult needs to be destroyed if civilization is to survive.

Reply->

Annie SNG • Nov 24, 2017 at 16:39

According to UNWRA, for an Arab to be eligible for refugee status he had only to have lived in the area for two years. There was no refugee status or monies allotted to the Jews of the area that were driven from Judea and Samaria by Jordanian armies. To my knowledge the UN have given vast amounts of aid to Arab refugees but none whatsoever to the Jewish ones.

Reply->

tiki • Nov 20, 2017 at 05:38

This article should be printed in all newspapers where truth & facts still count and send to all governments & organisations who bend the truth to their own agenda!

Reply->

Jasper Farnsworthy • Nov 20, 2017 at 04:54

In like manner, the incessant call for "a two-state solution" completely ignores the fact that a "Palestinian State" currently exists. It is called the "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan" which -- as this article points out -- was created out of the British Mandate. There was to be an Arab state -- east of the Jordan -- and a Jewish state -- west of the Jordan. The Arabs got their state way back in 1921, but the Jews NEVER "fully" got their intended state. The U.N. partition in 1948 -- which led to the establishment of Israel -- divided the land pledged to the Jews even further. The Jews accepted the division -- the Arabs did not -- and the 1948 War of Independence was waged. Even now the Jewish State does not enjoy full sovereignty over the territory originally pledged to them -- ie, ALL the land west of the Jordan. Instead, the world calls the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria "occupation", and constantly complains and sanctions Israel for nearly everything they do in these disputed territories. Two-State Solution? It already exists. The Arabs are sovereign over 5 million square miles of land on the planet; the Jews only about 8,000 square miles. The Arabs don't need another state on the planet; they just don't.

The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute.
Both reserve the right not to publish replies to articles should they so choose.
Gatestone Institute is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, Federal Tax ID #454724565.